This blog focuses on the science of designing surveys. Looking at the best ways to engage and communicate with survey respondents and how to generate effective feedback from your surveys. It explores and identifies new ideas and techniques surrounding online research. It looks at The Future of Market Research.

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Thursday, 3 November 2011

The Winners of The Research Transformation award

These are the result of the Research Transformations awards which I was asked to organise for a special session at the NewMR Festival. These awards were initiated to celebrate the things that have had (or are having!) the most transformative impact on market research. The awards have been judged by an esteemed panel of 30 leading research innovators and thought leaders from across the industry. The full list of judges is published below and I would like to thank them all for their time and active contributions to these awards.

This is the judging survey and if you would like to CAST YOUR OWN VOTES on these awards please do, and I hope to be able to publishing the results of this open vote in the future, it may be interesting to compare the open vote with those of the judging panel:http://qsurvey.gmisurveys.com/dc/index.html?p=jwoYlg

The big ideas that are transforming how we think about market research
The first award is for the big ideas that are transforming how we think about market research. Over the few years a number of major ideas and theme have emerged that have shaped the way we think.

1. Listening rather than asking
The emergence of social media has opened up a whole new viewpoint on how to conduct research moving away from asking questions to listening to what people are saying. What is has spawned a whole new industry monitoring and measuring and analysing what we are saying when we are not asked questions by market researcher. Listening is becoming more important than asking.

2. The hidden decision making process of our brain

We are slowly learning more and more about how our brains work and we are finding out that the way we decide things and make decisions is a lot more complicated that we think and a lot of it happens outside of our consciousness. This thought is really transforming how many market researchers think about conducting research, no longer can we rely on simply asking questions we have look further.3. Information can be beautiful

We in the market research agency can be labelled by the outside world an boring numbers people but the arrival of inforgraphics onto the scene and new story telling technique have started to make our industry a whole lot more sexy!

This is the full list of nominations....

Wisdom of the crowds: Discovering that groups can make intelligent decisions

Information can be beautiful: The idea that data can be sexy, and there are a lot more creative ways of presenting data than a bar chart

The hidden decision making process of our brain: Leaning that our concious mind is not always in control of our decisions

Herd thinking: Understanding the power of social influence

Co-creation: We can work together to create things

Gamification: Using gaming techniques to get respondents to think more effectively

Listening rather than asking: The idea of gaining incite from the mass of communicaton happening on the internet and using observation and means of conducting research

Big data: The emerging opportunity to consolidate information from all sources of sources to undertake super analysis

Thin slicing: The idea that you can generate a lot more incite than you think from very small data sources

The communitisation of market research: We are all sharing a lot more ideas & information with things like twitter, linkedin and blogs and this is "superscalling" our industry

General research techniques & methodologies that are transforming how we conduct market research
The second award is for the specific techniques and methodologies that have had a transformative impact on market research. I asked the judges not to pick out specifically the ones that had had most impact but pick out the methodologies and techniques that resonated most with them personally

.1. Research communities

Citation: MROC communities have been the real success story for market research over recent years, spawning a raft of successful new business and re-engineered how many businesses are interacting with their customers2.Co-creationCitation: This technique has married marketers and consumer together to revolutionise product development3. GamificationCitation: An idea that has set the industry alight with the realms of possibilities it offers to not just gather data but to communicate with consumers and clients alike.

This full list of nominations.... Text analytics

Infographics

Mobile phone research

Co-creation

Conjoint analysis

Gamification

Predictive markets trading

Real time research

Virtual shopping

Research communities

Social media monitoring

Behavioral economics

Neuro-research

Online qualitative research

Implicit association research

Eye tracking

Online dial testing

Location based research

Mobile ethnography

Conquest sofa technique

Facial emotion recognition

Observational research

Books that have had a transformative impact on Market research
These are the books that our judging panels felt have had the most transformative impact on how we think about market research

1. Information is Beautiful
Citation: David McCandless’s book is a must have addition to any market researchers coffee table! The book that made data sexy

2. The Wisdom of the Crowds
Citation: James Surowiecki’s book is one of the most cited books in Market research a wonderful validation of what we all hoped to be believe that collectively we are smarter than we think.

3. How we decide
Citation: Jonah Lehrer’s book delves into the hidden decision making process of the brain, a must read for would be behavioural scientists

This is the short list of books compiled largely from a linkedIn discussion I set in place earlier this year.

Innovation in any field is strongly linked to the quality of cross communication and the ways of communicating ideas about market research have proliferated in recent years with the advent of the internet. Here is a list of nominations of research organisations, publications and new communication channels that are transforming how we think about market research.

Research organisationsWinner: ESOMAR
Citation: A truly global market research organisation which unites the world of market research

The nominees:

ESOMAR

WARC

The Market Research Society

The ARF

Research & Results

CASROQRCA

GORMRA

AMA

PublicationsWinner: Research Magazine
Citation: It has its fingers on the pulse of market research ! Covering both the stories and the people behind market research and its successful blend of online and offline communication.

The nominees:

International Journal of Market Research

Quirk

Admap

Research Magazine

New media communication channelsWinner: Twitter
Citation: Emerging as the No.1 platform for the transfer of news and ideas across the Market Research communityRunner up: The blogging community
Citation: Market research bloggers are really driving forward the market research agenda.

The nominees:

Twitter

The general blogging communities

Greenbook BlogLinkedInNextGenMRFacebookFestival of New MR!

Finally here are some more specialist categories that I have grouped together

Data analysisWinner: Big Data

The nominees:Big data

Conjoint analysis

Text analytics

Semantic analysis

Discourse analysis

Respondent self analysis

Data presentation

The winner: story telling

The nominees:

Wordle

Dashboarding

Story telling

Infographics

Mobile phone based research

The winner: Location based research

The nominees:Location based research

Mobile ethnography

Me research

Interactive experiences

OrganizationalWinners: The younger generation of MR firms

Citation: The last decade has seen the rapid growth of a number of new MR first which have really transformed and shaken up the market research industry

The nominees:Off shoring

Existing leading MR firms

The younger generation of MR firms

New entrants from outside traditional MR

Client side market research teams

The panelist providers

Qual Techniques

Winners: Hybrid quali-quant techniques

Citation: The lines between qual and quant are rapidly blurring and techniques that blend the two are very much seen as the future.

The nominees:Online focus groups

Hybrid quali-quant techniques

Webcam interviews

Online offline techniques

Focus group game play techniques

NLP inspired techniques

Software

The Winner: Confirmit
Citation: Its flexibility and depth of features it has become the most widely adopted platform for designing online surveys in the MR industry

The nominees:

Confirmit

SPSS

Survey Monkey

Snap

Survey Gizmo

Sawtooth

Etabs

Market Tools

Qstreaming

Technology enabled methodologies

The Winner: Facial emotion recognition
Citation: Anyone who has seen this in action cannot be failed to be impressed with its potential as a market research tool

The nominees: Virtual shopping

Implicit association research

Eye tracking

Online dial testing

Facial emotion recognition

Click testing/heat mapping

Ways of gathering data

The winner: Social media sourcing
Citation: Who would bet against social media becoming a primary channel for accessing audiences for market research?

Runner up: Intelligent Sample merging

Citation: Mix sample sources are going to be ever more important in the future and technology that can intelligently merge sample will have a critical role to play

8 comments:

what is scientific notationScientific Notation include in the mathematics course. In the world of science some time we deal with numbers which are very small and those which are very large. In some branches of science large numbers while in others very small numbers are used.

About the author

My name is Jon Puleston and I am VP Innovation of the GMI interactive division at Lightspeed Research. This however is my personal blog which means that the views I express here may or may not reflect the views of the company I work for! (disclaimer over). This is also a blog being written by a dyslexic, so I am afraid there may be one or two spelling mistakes to contend with so I apologise in advance.

The focus of my job is to work out how to design better surveys for our clients by making them more engaging consumer experiences. I have done a lot of research over the last few years into this topic and in the blog I hope I can share what I have learnt along the way. I am also interested in market research innovation more generally and so this is an area I also cover in this blog.